Mentoring can increase a company’s odds of success more than almost anything else, according to studies. That’s why franchisors sell the fact that franchising is about being in business for yourself, but not by yourself. But what about the franchisors themselves?

Sportspeople have coaches. Business people have mentors. Franchisees have franchisors. But what do franchisors have?

In my experience, many franchisors believe that because they are a kind of mentor themselves, they don’t require mentoring. This attitude seems to have found its way into FANZ, the Franchise Association of New Zealand. Many other franchise associations around the world offer mentoring as a service to franchisor members. I believe this has been mooted within FANZ, but as of today there is no mention of it on the Association website. Yet the funny thing is that most of the professional mentors I know don’t share this attitude. Most of them are big believers in mentoring the mentors.

The positive impact of mentoring on executive performance – even at CEO and company founder level – has been demonstrated by a number of studies. Top executive performance can have a marked difference on company performance. Endeavor Insight, the research arm of Endeavor, a nonprofit that supports high-impact entrepreneurs across the world, studied thousands of tech startups in New York, the second largest tech hub in the world, from 2003 – 13. They found that a key factor in the top performing firms was the mentoring of their founders by a top-performing entrepreneur, as the graph below shows.